


chapters

by drew_it_craft



Category: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games), rdr2 - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, F/M, I Will Go Down With This Ship, dont question the science its fine, listen i just needed this for my soul
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-26
Updated: 2021-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-17 03:14:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29710770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drew_it_craft/pseuds/drew_it_craft
Summary: Mary-Beth's long-dead muse for an unfinished book suddenly comes back to life. Arthur Morgan is a dead man walking, and his is a story no one would have thought to have told. Together, they seek a happy ending to the chaos.
Relationships: Arthur Morgan/Mary-Beth Gaskill, Mary-Beth Gaskill & Arthur Morgan
Comments: 5
Kudos: 21





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> hello this is very much just a thing for my own heart, but you're invited to read along. chicken soup for the soul and all that.  
> a reimagining of the end of Red Dead Redemption 2, with some hand-wavy timey-wimey stuff that we don't need to think too hard about. Just hush and read about two people falling in love GOOD DAY
> 
> (hey also I guess this is a given but uh MASSIVE spoilers for the end of RDR2 alright byeee)

Saint Denis was a strange place. It was a crustacean nestled in the bend of the Lannahechee, feeding hungrily off the backs of the working class it pushed into the mud. But it was also a glimmering arrowhead, the shiny pinpoint that soared through societal and industrial advancement. It provided jobs, trade, comfortable living arrangements, culture. 

Mary-Beth could see both sides of the coin. A blessing and a malediction. She had once known men that would curse the very ground the city stood upon. A blemish on the beautiful face of the “true American dream.” She could understand what they’d meant by it, but now that she’d pulled her head out of the swill she’d lived in for years, rubbed the mud out of her eyes a bit, she could see the way that blemish was more of a beauty mark.

It was the culture that Mary-Beth loved the most. It was what kept her visiting from time to time. There wasn’t much in the way of culture in sleepy Emerald Ranch. Not unless you counted her cousin’s experimental Italian suppers. But those were poor mimicries at best. 

In Saint Denis, Mary-Beth could pretend she was anywhere. The French flair inspired silly, girlish fantasies of roaming the streets of Paris with a book in hand and a flower in her hat. The smell of Chinese cuisine floating through the cobblestone alleyways enticed her into wanderlust, wondering what it would be like to go there. She could fool herself so easily, forget the way the men in the railyards sweat, or how the young boys in the docks had to haul heavy boxes instead of playing hide and seek between them. She could excuse the smog that muddled the haint blue of the sky in favor of a few foolish hours of pretend. 

Mary Beth was very good at pretending. She’d spent her entire life living hundreds of different lives in her head. From childhood, she could remember the worlds she lived in, the people only she knew. The princes she kissed, the dragons she’d slain.

As she’d grown, the stories became less fantastical, and more… longing. Reimaginings of her current story, but with different twists and turns that were easier to handle. Instead of a sheet on the ground, a plush cot of furs and linens. Instead of a gritty stew, a piping hot bowl of chicken and fresh veggies. Instead of death, life and love and laughter. She’d had that sometimes, but not always, and certainly not toward the end of… Well.

Now, her stories made it to print. They were silly romantics, things she’d imagined to fill her time while she tended chickens or stitched men’s breeches. They were all abhorrent. She never knew the right words to use. Her storytelling was meandering and boring, her plot twists lackluster. But for some reason or another, they sold. 

There was only one that she did not hate, and it was because it was true. Or, at the very least, mostly true. It was also the only book of hers she had not published, as she hadn’t had it in her to finish it. 

That was partly her reason for making the trip today. A breath of fresh (figuratively) air might do her well. A bit of stretching her legs, a bit of people watching. Perhaps it would do something magical to her brain, she thought. Perhaps the cure for writer’s block was simply… not writing at all. Oh, she could pretend, couldn’t she?

Mary-Beth strolled carelessly through the streets of the bustling city, her book in hand, the tarnished fountain pen she’d had for near on a decade in the other. Here and there, she jotted down small notes to herself, or a few scattered words she tried desperately to link together in some kind of meaningful sentence or another. Most of it, she would end up scratching out later. Her journal was a mess of ink, senseless to anyone but her. Her cousin once asked if she’d gone and made up her own language for the damned thing. 

The spring breeze that carried the ripe smell of horse dung plucked at the pages of her journal, but she held tight to it as she moved. Her mind was wandering, her eyes unfocused on where exactly she was going as she mulled over the note she’d taken about the trumpet performer in the city square. It was safe to say that Mary-Beth was not paying any attention, and so it was by very, very good fortune that a rough hand would wrap surely around her upper arm just as she was stepping across a narrow street.

The hand yanked her backward, and in her startled fear, she dropped her journal and pen. They both clattered to the ground as a carriage drawn by a spooked horse raced speedily by, only inches from where she’d been. Heart in her throat, she gaped at the passing carriage for a beat, stunned still as the hand of the kind stranger that had saved her life fell away. She only thought to look away when she noted that the figure that the hand belonged to was now stooping to collect her belongings.

Mary-Beth exhaled the breath that had caught in her chest like a fly in honey. The stranger; a man; had his back nearly to her as he gathered her things. She could not see it, but she did feel her face flush with embarrassment, her freckles stark in contrast to the red. Eyes cast down, she stepped forward to place a gloved hand against the worn leather coat that the man wore; an atypical garment to see in this city. **”Heavens, you saved my life.”** She exhaled in a sheepish laugh.

The man, who was much taller than she was, but did not carry a huge amount of width, still had not turned to her. Nor had he said a word aside from a small grunt of what she was not certain. Relief or irritation, it was hard to tell. Mary-Beth’s brow sank some, her smile dropping just a bit as she stepped to the side more. Peering up, she tried to get a better look at the face that was curtained by shaggy brown hair streaked with grey, and shadowed by a wrangler hat. 

Only then did she realize that the man had paused, because he was staring down at the fountain pen he held in one hand. Territorialism pressed an ugly thumb into the small of her back, urging her to snatch it from this stranger’s hand. It was a very nice pen and had been a gift from someone she cared very deeply about. It was engraved with her initials and all. Was this stranger who dressed like he hadn’t left the 1890’s planning to snatch it from her while she was proverbially down? Well, if he was, he wasn’t being very quick about it, was he? 

**”Sir?”** She questioned. 

Only then did he straighten fully from his half hunch. He melted into movement, like a rose unfrozen from winter’s frost. He turned to her, and she glanced at him briefly before promptly opening her hands for her belongings. Embarrassed still, and quite eager to get her things back, she did not linger too much on his face. That was until he did not place the things she’d dropped into her hands. Instead, he held them, loosely, but with no indication of offering them to her. She frowned in earnest now, prepared to tut at him for being so rude after being so kind as to save her.

But the words did not come as she looked into the man’s face. In fact, her mind went blank, as if she’d been kicked in the head by a shoed horse. The face that peered down at her was mostly obscured by a beard that reached the middle of the man’s chest. The rest was rosy and speckled from the sun, the skin below the eyes sunken and somewhat sallow. Wrinkles punctuated years into the man’s face, gathering around the corners of his eyes and between his brows. 

He looked like any ruffian that lived his life on a ranch or in the woods, and she might have brushed him off as a fur trader or even a criminal if it were not for the eyes that stared down into hers.

They were hooded and blue, steady despite the glossiness that ringed the edges. They betrayed the rest of the man’s harsh features, soft as they were. Like a cake pulled from the oven too soon, baked well except for the gooey center. She knew those eyes. She knew this face. But it was no delighted revelation that came with reuniting with an old friend. This was not so simple. 

The man she saw standing before her was dead.


	2. Chapter 2

Arthur Morgan was dead. 

Tilly Jackson had told her as much, who’d been told by Charles, who had buried his body. Mary-Beth’s heart had shattered at the news. She had wept for weeks, she had felt so entirely empty. For years, nearly a decade, she had always felt the spot in her heart that losing Arthur had left. It had sibling spots, empty spaces that she felt for losing many people she’d once cared about. But Arthur’s had always been so very deep, so very painful at times. 

Perhaps it was because she knew it was truly not fair. He’d been a good man, he had not deserved to die, especially not after he had done so much to make sure he did right by those he cared about. That was all she would allow herself to think of it, even if she knew there was more to it. More to the feelings she’d had for him. It did not matter. She had mourned, she had visited his grave. She had written a story about her life and how it intertwined with his and the lives of their friends. His was the end that she could not bring herself to write. 

And now he stood before her.

It couldn’t be, could it? Surely she was seeing things. Surely, it was just the lighting or the stress of the situation; she knew she could be fragile at times. Surely she hadn’t simply lost her marbles. And yet, clear as day, there he stood. A specter of her past life. A certifiable haunting. But he was not ghastly or ghoulish. He did not groan or wail or lament to her about the things she ought to have done to save him. He stood before her looking just about like he was seeing a ghost, himself. 

The man was the first to break the silence. He stepped back to a respectful distance as he cleared his throat, a hoarse sound that was like dry leaves. Head bowing some, he extended the items to Mary-Beth with renewed propriety. **”Sorry, madame.”** He drawled, and it was unmistakable. Even heavy with age, hoarse with strain, it was still Arthur. 

Mary-Beth did not truly feel her head shaking, nor did she realize the sting in her eyes was from welling tears, which bubbled at the roots of her lashes. **”I thought I recognized- or…”** He continued head shaking as he again pushed the book and pen toward Mary-Beth’s trembling hands. She took them blindly. What was he saying? She was having a hard time grasping the words. 

**”Well. Anyways,”** He receded into hardly more than a mumble, tipping his hat toward their hands as he took another step away toward the street. He was trying to leave her. Trying to go again, when she’d just gotten him back.

It was a primal, instinctive thing to reach out and grip his wrist with more force than she really intended. Mary-Beth was a slight woman, but the strength in her hands was telltale of the years of labor she’d been put through. The hands beneath the white gloves she wore were not those of a manicured lady of a manor. There was dirt beneath her nails, scars and callouses. Now they held his wrist, yanking him back into place in the sphere around which Mary-Beths reality was beginning to crumble.

He stiffened, twisted his body away from her, the free hand impulsively moving back on his hip toward the butt of a gun in a holster. He did not touch it, though. Instead, he looked down at her, guarded and looking a little green. Mary-Beth realized her impropriety but did no more than loosening her grip just a tad. 

**”What did you recognize.”** She questioned, hardly more than a sharp exhale. Her face had grown very still, very stony, like it was carved from marble. How was this real? She felt like any moment she would wake from a dream and feel guilty for having imagined a dead man walking. 

He cleared his throat again, swallowing hard as his eyes wavered on her face. She did not look away from his. More and more, she could recognize the man she knew. He was buried under years of clear hardship, of exhaustion and strain, but he was there.

**”The pen.”** He admitted after a pregnant pause.

 **”Not me?”** Mary-Beth volleyed back.

 **”Well, yes, but…”** He shook his head, somehow under the impression that she might not be who he thought she was. Or was he hoping that she wasn’t? **”I must have been mistaken.”** He near on pleaded. 

Mary-Beth lifted her head, looked him right in the face. A million and one words swarmed her brain like angry hornets, but all that escaped the nest was, **“Arthur Morgan, you are an awful liar.”** It came out breathless, incredulous.

She watched through welling tears as his face split into a grimacing smile, his head hanging some as he exhaled some sound that seemed to have been caught in his throat. But the tension still held him rigid. **”It is you, then, Mary-Beth.”** He murmured out, and her knees just about turned to jelly at the sound of his voice around her name. 

She choked back a sob, but she could not keep the tears from dripping down her freckled cheek as she tutted softly back, **”Of course it’s me.”** Her voice hardly more than a reedy whisper. He inhaled, nodded, but his eyes did not meet hers. He was silent, at a loss for words, so she supplied some. **”But… but look at you! Arthur… I-”** It seemed words had deserted both of them in their time of need. Well, at least she was used to that breed of betrayal. **”Well. Tilly told me you had died.”** She decided on, quiet, mournful. 

Arthur frowned, though it was largely obscured by the overgrowth of the beard that wreathed most of the bottom half of his face. He nodded, sniffed softly as his blue eyes grazed hers once. **”Yeah, well, I might as well have.”** He said in answer, which plucked a string of irritation in her chest. What did that mean! What did any of this mean? She felt half crazed, not even sure if this was real just yet, and he was supplying her with nothing solid in the way of explanation. 

But she couldn’t be fussed. Not really. Not when most of the pressure she was feeling was from the immeasurable relief at seeing him in the flesh, alive and breathing. The how and why were secondary to that. It softened her approach as she squeezed his wrist, her brows knitting as she sought for his eyes. **”Would you be terribly opposed to explaining over… over tea, somewhere? I know a place…”**

This all felt so strange. Inviting a man she’d known only in memory for the past decade to tea. But standing in the road of San Denis balking at each other wasn’t accomplishing anything. It was clear neither of them expected to see one another today, neither was prepared to navigate this, but now that they were faced with it, Mary-Beth could not bring herself to let him go without some kind of context for it. 

Some part of her expected him to say no, the way he’d been acting. So intent to get out of it, so willing to let it be a trick of his mind or some strange coincidence that he might run into a woman with a familiar-looking pen and a similar face to someone he’d once known. She prepared to insist, to implore him to join her, perhaps suggest a walk through the city instead of tea. But, after a calculating moment, Arthur nodded. **”Lead the way, Miss Gaskill.”**


End file.
